Another survey of 2,080 knowledge workers released in January by Gartner Research measured employee retention after mandated RTOs. On average, when companies forced workers back to the office, those workers’ intent to stay with the organization declined by 8%, according to Gartner.
“Mandated on-site requirements can carry very steep costs for talent attraction and retention,” said Catilin Duffy, a research director in Gartner’s HR practice. “This is especially true for high performers, women, and millennials — three employee segments who greatly value flexibility. Often, these costs far outweigh the moderate benefits to employee engagement and effort. We also found no benefit to performance.”
Among high-performing employees, their desire to stay with their employer dropped by 16%. And among millennials and women, plans to stay in their current role declined by 10% and 11%, respectively.
Gartner’s study followed research published in December by the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh; that study found RTO mandates don’t help an organization’s financial performances, and can make workers less satisfied with their jobs and work-life balance.
The UPenn study compared a sample of Standard & Poor’s 500 firms that had RTO mandates to those that appeared not to have such mandates. (The sample covered 457 firms and 4,455 quarterly observations between June 2019 and January 2023.)
The UPenn study found significant declines in employees’ ratings of overall job satisfaction, work-life balance, senior management, and corporate culture after a firm announced an RTO mandate.
“Also, we show that employees’ other ratings that are not closely related to RTO do not significantly change,” the study stated. “The RTO push is eyewash for investors to prove that drops in revenue and profitability aren’t a result of poor managerial decisions but the result of lazy workers sitting at home in their pajamas.”
